Invocation of my demon brother

Zachary Lazar’s second novel, "Sway" (Little, Brown: 260 pp., $23.99), which Mark Rozzo reviews in this Sunday’s Book Review, interweaves three iconic stories--the rise of the Rolling Stones from 1962 through Altamont; the long, strange trip of underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger; and the sorry saga of Charles Manson associate (and convicted killer) Bobby Beausoleil--to get at the dark side of the 1960s, the moment when the Age of Aquarius imploded into Luciferian light.

It’s an odd book, all glittery surfaces and collapsing possibilities, but what may be strangest is that it involves so much history we can actually see. As I read "Sway," I kept using the Internet as an enhancement, a way to make some pieces of the story come alive.

After finishing Lazar’s account of Anger’s 1947 film, "Fireworks," I looked the movie up on YouTube and watched it for myself. I did the same with "Scorpio Rising," the 1964 biker film that made Anger a minor celebrity when it was banned in California.

As for Beausoleil, I discovered that he’s still in prison, where he makes art and music, which he sells on a website that offers only glancing reference to his role in the 1969 Manson-directed murder of music teacher Gary Hinman. ("During the commission of an absurdly misconceived drugs transaction, things went terribly wrong, and BeauSoleil killed a man.")

Then, of course, there are the Stones. We all know what they look like, but even 38 years later, it’s shocking to watch violence explode as they play "Sympathy for the Devil" at Altamont, as if they’ve invoked a force they couldn’t control.

This is the point of Lazar’s novel, that the 1960s were a time in which all sorts of children (the Stones, Anger and Beausoleil among them) got involved with things they didn’t understand. It’s also the idea behind Anger’s film "Invocation of My Demon Brother," which suggests that every invocation is followed by an evocation, desire become action and then unleashed upon the world.

That’s a fascinating concept, but "Sway" also raises a number of wholly contemporary questions about the way literature (or, for that matter, history) operates in our own digitized and archived time. Does it enhance or diffuse the power of Lazar’s novel to read it in conjunction with the computer, to look up and literally watch many of its scenes? What does it mean for memory, for reading, for our own power as writers and readers to invoke and then evoke a shared fictional dream?

I don’t know the answers to those questions; it’s just that I’ve never read a book in quite this way before.

David L. Ulin

Comments

[Richard Nash]

I think you're going to be doing more of that, especially when more and more readers will be reading books that way because the books themselves will be wired ;-) Check this out: http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2007/06/the_paper_ebook.html#trackbacks

Actually, I doubt that kinda technology could possibly be commercialized, but, while it won't be the Kindle, people wil be reading long-form narratives on screen soon enough and the experience you just had, David, will become even more common, and all to the good!

[Ashley Cook]

I think this is a very interesting new way to read in a different interactive way. What you asked is what will it do for memory? Well, I think being able to access video of the actual events in fiction or not talked about in the book, great, because I have no memory of what this book is talking about, since I wasn't alive at the time. Sure, i could learn and live through the history in books, but if there are also video documentary, websites with more information than the book offers, cool. I haven't read the book you're talking about, but after reading your review, I want to. I don't necessarily like reading a lot on the computer, well, at least I used to not, but I'm finding myself reading a lot on the computer more and more. I love to write. I used write on yellow pads before putting into the computer, but now I go straight to the computer and type. Same with listening to music. I have a dinky stereo, but I don't use it. I just turn my computer on and listen to music, mostly with headphones. I can't bump it from computer, but anyway, computers, the internet, etc...a tool to innovate the status quo.